CMDB Unify Silos of Service Management to Deliver Value

Transcription

1 CMDB Unify Silos of Service Management to Deliver Value Applies to: SAP IT Service Management application, SAP CRM 7.0. For more information, visit the Customer Relationship Management homepage. Summary Historically many organizations created configuration management databases (CMDBs) in order to maintain a snapshot of their IT configuration. However, now IT organizations are looking to a CMDB to help them manage their infrastructure effectively and thereby enhance the value of services they provide. This paper provides an overview of a smart CMDB and the value it can bring to an organization. Author: Akash Winny Company: SAP AG Created on: January 2010 Author Bio Akash Winny is a product manager for the SAP Customer Relationship Management application in the service area and has been actively involved in IT service management and case management SAP AG 1

2 Table of Contents Introduction... 3 What Is a Smart CMDB?... 3 How CMDB Links with IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL)... 4 Why CMDB Is Important... 6 Related Contents... 7 Copyright SAP AG 2

3 Introduction Businesses want their IT organizations to transform themselves from providers of technology to strategic business partners, fully engaged with the overall organization to satisfy corporate goals. They expect their IT departments to deliver solutions that will provide a wedge between them and competition. The more companies depend on IT to execute business strategy, the more imperative it is for IT to align its activities with business objectives. This boils downs to a simple fact: the IT group needs to treat the business it serves as a customer, which requires a steady focus on quality, transparency, cost management, and customer satisfaction. This initiative to fuse IT with business is underscored by the evolving role of the CIO. Many CIOs do well in the management of IT operations. However, very few actually show the way to get real business benefits from IT investments. Sure, managing IT supply to keep the engine running cost-efficiently and reliably is the heart of the job. But CIOs need to direct their attention away from managing IT supply and towards managing IT demand. Today, CIOs are being challenged to shed their operational duties and concentrate on identifying and even developing technologies to help their organizations innovate. Many IT groups lack the standardized processes and best practices required to manage basic IT operations in an orderly and efficient manner. Service-oriented architecture (SOA) and virtualization have made IT environments more complex and volatile than ever before. One of the toughest challenges that IT organizations face today is that the network and application management systems focus on different aspects of IT management and use different tools. A way to address some of these challenges is by using a smarter, or operational, configuration management database (CMDB). Using a smarter CMDB allows strategic CIOs to gain a much better understanding of all configuration item (CI) components that may be affected by configuration changes. It also allows them to deftly handle high volumes of evolving CIs and their interrelationships. This provides a huge advantage in the ability to reduce the number of IT outages, which in turn affects business. What Is a Smart CMDB? While a lot of organizations have a good sense of the potential benefits of a configuration management database, the notion continues to be confusing to many. In short, a CMDB provides a single, logical model of the IT infrastructure in terms of CI components and relationships (see Figure 1). In its simplest form, the CMDB contains information about IT assets like servers, desktops networks, and software. In fact, CMDBs started out as simple spreadsheets and Microsoft Word documents, which became very difficult to maintain. These documents were not useful for sharing information across large IT organizations, since they were both cumbersome and time consuming, and could not support root cause and impact analysis. In the last few years the CMDB has evolved to more than just an asset database, and can now be used to define component dependencies and hierarchical relationships that make up an IT service delivered to the business or to the IT customers. As such, the smart CMDB has become a more popular concept in recent times, thanks to frameworks such as IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL). Financial Data Center Server CMDB Application Network Change Figure 1: A Single, Logical Model of the IT Infrastructure 2009 SAP AG 3

4 Time to value is a key consideration for an IT organization, and requires a smart CMDB to be both effective and efficient. This demands the following critical features: 1 Reconciliation To ensure that the data is captured properly from different elements while at the same time avoid duplication of this data, enabling the matching of different CIs from different sources Federation To integrate existing data sources by their locations without a centralized gigantic database, requiring that all CIs are available for auto-discovery and relation mapping Synchronization To ensure that the available data is reliable and accurate across integrated systems A smart CMDB must also have the following basic characteristics. Comprehensiveness A CMDB must be comprehensive in content and capacity. It must have the potential to represent all the data about CIs and services within an organization. It must also be able to analyze unrelated data to answer critical questions regarding root cause analysis, impact, and more. Real-time information If the right decisions are to be made for root cause or impact analysis, the data supporting these decisions must be as up-to-date as possible. In many IT organizations, one of the vital pieces found missing is integration to real-time configuration data. CI and service-state information Just as real-time information is needed to make informed decisions, realtime state information is also necessary. State information refers to availability, capability, performance, or even key performance indicators. Combining real-time state information with other real-time CI information such as relationships or attributes makes root cause and impact analysis both accurate and effective. Visualization Users need the ability to show logically the peer-to-peer or hierarchical relationships between different CIs. Scalability To accommodate rapid business expansion, a CMDB must have the capacity to store, manage, and provide data around the globe. How CMDB Links with IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) ITIL is the only consistent and comprehensive documentation of best practices for IT service management. This is a customizable framework of good practices designed to manage IT systems that specifically address the strategic business value generated by the IT organization and its delivery of high-quality IT services. Note: The terms ITIL and IT Infrastructure Library are registered trademarks of the United Kingdom's Office of Government Commerce. ITIL version 3 comprises five parts (see Figure 2): Service strategy Service design Service transition Service operations Continual service improvement 2009 SAP AG 4

5 Figure 2: Elements of the ITIL Framework CMDB belongs to the service asset and configuration management process, which is a part of service transition (see Figure 3). ITIL standards recommend using a CMDB because it is a core component of mature, standard IT service management processes. ITIL defines CMDB as a repository used to store configuration records throughout their lifecycle. The configuration management system (CMS) contains one or more CMDBs. The ITIL goals for configuration management are: Account for all IT assets and configurations within services and the organization Provide accurate information on configurations and their documentations to support all the other service management processes Provide a sound basis for incident management, problem management, change management, and release management Provide verification of the configuration records against the infrastructure and correct any exceptions Problem Incident Continuity Release Change SLM CMDB Service Desk Finance Configuration Availability Capacity Figure 3: Processes Affected by CMDB 2009 SAP AG 5

6 Why CMDB Is Important Much of the buzz surrounding CMDBs has to do with IT cost-saving benefits. IT managers who have deployed CMDBs provide several reasons for operational cost savings, such as: Reduction of unnecessary servers and other hardware Better license and maintenance contract management Effective management of outsourcing agreements Improved service delivery These cost savings do not necessarily translate into improved service from a business perspective because users are not interested in servers, operating systems, and so forth. Rather, they are more concerned with how well IT helps them create business value. This leads to a less frequently discussed advantage of CMDB. With the help of a smart CMDB, IT operations can monitor and track changes to the infrastructure over time. In addition, because these changes are tracked in real time, it is easy to see them as they occur. In many organizations today, at least one-third of the IT enterprise is not monitored by a network or systems management tools, thereby leaving a fair chance of failures. By using a good CMDB, organizations can proactively monitor and manage critical parts of their infrastructure so that problems are discovered earlier. This would reduce the number and significance of the outages, and in many cases even eliminate them. It could be said that a true configuration management database is the backbone of business. Apart from gathering data, a smart CMDB should propel CIOs into a business forum, supporting timely, informed decision-making process through the organization that turns IT into an enabler of business. With proper planning, a smart CMDB can reduce both the mean time to repair and overall downtime. This leads to improved IT performance and thereby paves the way to service excellence SAP AG 6

7 Related Contents A Technical Overview of Novell CMDB360, March For more information, visit the Customer Relationship Management homepage 2009 SAP AG 7

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